Alix Shulman
Raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Alix attended public schools and planned to be a lawyer like her dad. But in college at Case Western Reserve University she was smitten by philosophy and upon graduation moved to New York City to study philosophy at Columbia University Graduate School. After some years as an encyclopedia editor, she enrolled at New York University, in a special program in mathematics, and later, while raising two children, earned an MA in Humanities. She became a civil rights activist in 1961 and a feminist activist in 1967. She published her first book in 1970 and taught her first class in 1973. Having explored in her five novels the challenges of youth and midlife, in her three memoirs she probed the later stages in the ongoing drama of her generation of women, taking on the terrors and rewards of solitude, of her parents' final years, and of her late-life calling as caregiver to her beloved husband for a decade until his death in 2014. Her latest book, the culmination of a lifetime of feminist activism, is a 600-page Library of America anthology of women's liberation writings, co-edited with Honor Moore.